The Home Service Expert Podcast - How Communicating with Empathy Can Help Technicians Achieve a 70% Closing Ratio

Episode Date: August 2, 2019

Joe Cunningham has been in the HVAC industry since the ‘80s. This multi-awarded HVAC consultant has held various leadership positions at the Technical Arts Center, Successtrack Network, and even the Small Business Advisory Council under President George Bush. In this episode, we talked about Recruitment, Marketing, Training...

I don't know many contractors that have a lot of long-term employees. There are some exceptions, and I could name some, but if we talk about the average company, they don't have a lot of long-term employees because they don't have bonus plans in place like you're talking about. And they don't spell that out for their employees as to what they could actually be or grow into by working for the company. So the lack of those programs keeps a lot of companies from growing. And then the unwillingness to hire entry-level people and train them and grow them into their business. One of the biggest problems we have right now is a shortage of technicians in the field.

And it doesn't matter whether we're talking about plumbing or HVAC or electrical. Our average tech today is over 50 years old. And not a lot of people are getting into the business. Welcome to the Home Service Expert, where each week, Tommy chats with world-class entrepreneurs and experts in various fields like marketing, sales, hiring, and leadership to find out what's really behind their success in business. Now, your host, the home service millionaire, Tommy Mello. Welcome back to the Home Service Expert.

My name is Tommy Mello and today I have Joe Cunningham. Joe has been in the HVAC industry since the 80s. He was a Technical Arts Center founder in 2014, SuccessTrack Network. He's the president from 1998 to now. Your air conditioning company from 1998 to now. Your Air Conditioning Company from 2000 to 2012. Service Experts National Training Director from 1996 to 1998. He's a 2015 top 15 most influential people in the HVAC industry. 2013 HVAC Consultant of the Year, 2011 HVAC Consultant of the Year, and Chairman for the President's Small Business Advisory Council under President George Bush. I've got to know Joe here over the last 20 minutes, and I got to say that, Joe, you know everybody in the industry,

and it just sounds like we're in for a treat today. How's your day going? My day is going just fine. It's a hot day here in Houston. I'm at my air conditioning company today. We've got a full day scheduled. We had a good day yesterday. It looks like another great day today. You know, you just named off so many names earlier.

Jim Abrams, Alan Ferguson, John Young, you know, Ron Smith, the godfathers. I think Jim Abrams and Ron Smith together are the godfathers of the HVAC industry. You teamed up, you know, all these guys. Tell me a little bit about your history and just, I love the story of you getting into the HVAC industry. So let's share it with the audience. Well, I was in the home improvement business and I sold roofing, siding, kitchens, bathrooms, that kind of thing. And I had sold a lady on the south side of Houston a big room addition.

And when we got done with the room addition, she said, you know, my air conditioning system didn't work too well last year, and you put this great big addition on there. I know it's not going to work too well this year. Can you put a new one in for me? Well, I didn't know anything about air conditioning, and I didn't know whether I could put one in or not. But the guy that framed for me, the carpenter, had a brother in the air conditioning business. So I called him up and he came down there and looked at this lady's place and he gave me a price on the air conditioning system. And I just added $1,000 to it. And she said, OK, she'd do it.

And I thought, wow, this is a great business. So that's kind of how I got started. And we were working in an area of town where a lot of people still had windy units, little houses, frame houses built after the Second World War. None of them had central air. A few of them had central heat. A few of them had central heat. And I just started selling air conditioning like I sold home improvements, door to door. And through that, I became one of the first people that ever sold a million dollars worth

of equipment in any given year. We've got a lot of guys doing it now, but there wasn't many doing it then. I mean, it's a crazy story how, you know, when I read this book, HVAC Spells Wealth, I just read it. I was camping this weekend. And in Fort Myers, I think that Ron Smith was one of 13 companies. And now there's probably 500 there. And actually, one of my best friends, Keegan, owns a really nice company. They do well over 50 million there.

But it's crazy just to hear how the industry has changed. You know what? Tell me a little bit about, so you've been on the advisory board for George Bush. You've also been, you deal with a lot of people. Tell me a little bit about what it's like and what's the first things you do when you go into a company and look at it?

Well, generally I send a questionnaire to the business owner before I go into a company and look at it? Well, generally, I send a questionnaire to the business owner before I go to a company to look at it. I want to find out a little bit about his business. It's a common thing for people to ask me, can you help my company grow? And my answer is always the same. I don't know. I need to ask you some questions. So I sent him a questionnaire and they fill it out and they tell me about the history of the business, how long they've been in business, how much business they're doing, manpower, revenue, profitability, that kind of thing. It always amazes me that these questions like that, a lot of people don't know the answer to other than how many people are working for them.

So they tell me as much as they can. But when I go into a company, even though I've got some preliminary information, I like to look at their financials, but I also like to look at things like their invoices because their invoices are going to tell me what they're doing in a way of driving revenue. You know, since so many of these businesses that I work with are mom and pops, or they started out as mom and pops, and they've grown to a certain level, it's hard sometimes to get these companies to reduce their overhead, but it is easier to get them to drive revenue. So the first thing I want to do when I look at a company is see how much we can improve the cash flow in the company. And then we kind of work backwards from there. So I see a lot of people, I've had some problems with overhead just

altogether. I got into the inventory business. I got into the mechanical truck business and I just found myself getting out of the home service industry altogether. And I brought myself back into it. And one of the things I love reading, you know, I read a lot of books, Joe, and there's not a lot of books I haven't read. And, you know, that just HVAC spells wealth is just on my mind. And I love the story when he says to the CSR, the dispatcher, when they say, hey, after he does the disc assessment, they say, well, how much does this job pay anyway? And he says, well, there's no limit. You know, most of our people are making over $20, but you can make $30, $40 an hour.

It just depends on how hard you want to work and how good you become on the training that we're going to give you. One of the things that took me a long time is to make sure that everybody wins in the company, you know, with what's in it for me. And I'll have a with them now. And I just came out with this new compensation program for my managers where they can make 140 grand a year pretty easily. But now they're answering their phone on the weekends. They're coming in on Sundays. They're telling their wife or their husband that we're willing to work late because this is going to make a better future for ourselves, our kids, our external family, everything. So tell me a little bit about, because that's one of the biggest broken things I see is people don't,

they don't retain people. What do you do when you got to go consult somebody on just getting the right people involved and making sure everybody wins? Well, that's kind of like three questions in one. So what do I do to assess their manpower to make sure everyone wins and stays there. The average small business owner today, because of the way that our businesses have developed, whether it's plumbing, electrical, HVAC, or whatever, they've started out as a technician themselves, and they've just kind of grown this business. And they look at it differently than most business people do. So they look at the business owners as what's in it for them. And then they try and derive what's

in it for them from the people that work for them and how much money they can bring in. And the new business models that we see today that provide things to the workers aren't always on the forefront of these contractors' minds, which causes an enormous turnover. I don't know many contractors that have a lot of long-term employees. There are some exceptions, you know, and I could name some, but if we talk about the average company, they don't have a lot of long-term employees because they don't have bonus plans in place like you're talking about. And they don't spell that out for their employees

as to what they could actually be or grow into by working for the company. So the lack of those programs keeps a lot of companies from growing. And then the unwillingness to hire entry-level people and train them and grow them into their business. You know, one of the biggest problems we have right now is a shortage of technicians in the field. It doesn't matter whether we're talking about plumbing or HVAC or electrical. Our average tech today is over 50 years old, and not a lot of people are getting into the business. They haven't figured out how to entice the young guys.

They try to hire the experienced guys. A lot of the experienced guys come with bad habits and a bad outlook from their old company. And they bring all that baggage with them. And it's really hard for these contractors to overcome that issue. Now, the ones that are really growing are the ones that have figured out how to grow a business and not just run a service company. They do things like you're talking about, how to have a bonus plan. They do things like you mentioned that Ron did. You know, you can earn 20 or you can earn 30 or you can earn 40.

It depends on how hard you work and what you do. And those companies are the ones that are really growing. So the staffing really is a huge thing. What I find too, tell me a little bit about, so the big thing in HVAC, I'm trying to think of the old technology. Now it's service tight and it seems to be the big one, but what was that other one called like 10 years ago? As far as software went?

Yeah. Well, if you really look back 10 years ago, the software was paper. There really wasn't any. Then some other programs came out. There was Desco, which came out eight or 10 years ago. And people have tried to do it with QuickBooks, but there really has been no great technology that was industry-wide. You know, when we talk about guys like Jim Abrams and John Young and what they did with Contractor Success Group, they actually brought

one of the most modern software companies into the business with them through Successware. Successware, that's what I was thinking of, yep. In fact, it was so advanced at the time that a lot of the guys just didn't get it. So nobody really got the full usage of that. And Successware still exists and is an entity out there today, although service fighting seems to be outstripping them pretty well. Yeah, I think that now, I got to tell you, my chief operating officer or my general manager,

I think COO for a service company, you tend to give people titles and they expect to get paid for a title, which I think could be a mistake. But he's become more of a technology guy. He knows how to get the data from the software very, very quickly. And one of the things, I got an advisor who coaches me and he told me, if you really want to make this thing grow, and he comes from Silicon Valley. And all he did was work on distribution programs. He worked on making people want to work harder. He said, give 200% of their base pay. So we worked on these compensation programs. And I'm telling you, I got people doing backflips to make our company successful. If they make 100 grand, I make a million. If they make 200 grand, I make 4 million. It's crazy what's going on now with this company. And the biggest thing I got to say is you don't need to lie, cheat, or steal. And a lot of people tell me, Joe, why everybody thinks that you're ripping people off when you charge them a fair amount and make 20%. But you also have a company that answers phones after hours, drive new trucks, have the latest software updates,

drug tests, background check. I mean, why is that? It all goes back to the evolution of our business. In the service industry, in the years I've been in it and seen the people get in here and grow their businesses, most of them started out as tech. And when they started out as tech, there wasn't even flat rate back then. So they were all on an hourly mentality. And they look at it as this is what I would do if it was my house. You know, and still today, the technicians go out there and the customers ask them, what would you do if it was your house? And instead of answering them as here's what I would do if it was my house and I were you, they answer it as here's what I'd do if it was my house and I were you. They answer it as, here's what I'd do if it was my house and I were me. So they still have a parts and material mentality. And they think that making the 20% net profit when they look at the price that we're

charging the customers is astronomical because they don't understand how much it costs to run a business. But today, in our environment, with the cost of insurance, with the cost of employment burden, with the cost of all the benefits we have to give to our employees to entice them to stay with us, your price has to be far more than it ever used to be when we were time and material. And then the internet today has even pushed the ones that aren't educated very much further against the wall because our customers are looking at the prices that we're charging them. And then they ask them, well, can you break this down for me, time and material? And the customer is taking that price and comparing it to what they get paid per hour,

which has nothing to do with what it costs to run a business. So our customers have the hourly mentality. Our technicians are stuck in the hourly mentality. But for the biggest part, a lot of business owners are still there. You know, I had Alan Ferguson send me a form and it basically shows, and I did this on last Thursday. First of all, I went over financing

and I teach financing. I beat it like a drum every week. We went over flat rate pricing and I said, okay guys, let's pretend we're going to make $65,000 and you're the owner of the company. We've got our cell phone bill. We've got our warehouse bill, small warehouse. We've got our marketing bill and you know, we use yellow pages. It was, you know, this is 15 years ago. We just went through everything. And I said, guys, this is 15 years ago. This is without CSRs. This is without

dispatchers, no warehouse guys. This is you doing everything. When you go on vacation, your company fails, but this is what it looks like. We need to charge $257 an hour to make 10%. And that's without charging any parts. That's just straight up. That's if you're in the house for an hour, that's what we need to charge to break even or 10%. I'm sorry. And you should have seen the look on these guys' faces because they thought, well, we only paid $15 for the part. Why can we charge a hundred? And then I showed him a picture of a guy missing three of his fingers and said, here's what happens if you don't know what you're doing. And then I told them just because you don't buy financing doesn't mean the customer doesn't. The smartest people in the world do same as cash because a dollar a day is worth more than a dollar tomorrow.

And since that day last week, I got to tell you, Joe, our sales have gone up dramatically by them understanding the fact that they don't, they're not ripping customers out. There's a cost to doing business. I'm not working out of my house. I do have insurance. You're driving a wrap truck with my gasoline. And you know what I mean? It's like, it's crazy to get this through to, I find it harder and you deal with a lot more business owners than I deal with, but I think it's important that they understand when they start here

what it costs to run a real business. Yes, it is. It's super important. And you know, when we talk to contractors, it often turns out that the biggest price objections come from the contractors and not the clients. And I go back, I read the book, this book this weekend, and I've read several books that say the same thing is why does every single business owner think they got to find somebody that's been in the HVAC or garage door or electric business? I understand plumbing, you need to have someone that's, you know, a journeyman or whatever, or, you know, there's different union shops and stuff like that. But why not grow a guy from scratch that knows it your way? What's the biggest misconception? Why does small businesses, especially five trucks or less, they say, I got to find a guy that knows what he's doing? Well, they focus primarily on the

mechanical. And the reason they have to have somebody that knows what they're doing is because they don't have a system in place that it takes to help a less experienced guy do it. We have a training center here too, the Technical Arts Center, and we train entry-level guys to work in the air conditioning business. And we have a fast track program. And we take a guy with no industry experience and we teach him in nine days to run maintenance calls. And, you know, a lot of people say you can't do that, but in nine days, you can teach a guy sequence of operation, how to use his gauges, how to use his meters, understand sub-cool and superheat, knows how to properly charge the system, and knows where to find the components, and then give him a detailed checklist, which very few people use, and make the technician

check all of the components in the heating and cooling system, and he just doesn't miss anything. But without all of those parts and hiring unskilled people, without the training to teach them the basics, and the most important thing, giving them the checklist so they can't make a mistake, very few people can make this work. And that's why they feel they need a very experienced guy. But the bad thing about hiring all experienced people is they've all been trained in different techniques, styles, and procedures. So you will have three guys that you are conceivably sending

out to do the same job and ending up with three different results because they don't have a checklist. And it cuts your profitability down, cuts your productivity down, cuts your ability to schedule your technicians down, where with the untrained guy that just follows it and does it your way, makes it easier for you and makes a lot more money. You know, one of the things that I think the pioneers of the HVAC industry, you talk Jim Abrams, Ron Smith, and a lot of these guys that have been doing this forever, Terry Nicholson or whatever. Service agreements are so important and they very much build the multiplier of what your business is worth. So when I'm looking at EBITDA, I get a much better multiplier on my profit when I've got a bunch of service agreements. And I've met a very

successful HVAC guy. I don't want to talk about his name at this point, but I'll tell you, he said, Tommy, when I get them on a service agreement, I'm in line to replace that unit. And he said, the industry average is less than 30% of when you go to a service agreement and you replace the unit. He said, we flag everything. If it's over eight years old, if the last guy had spoke about it last year, about the last service agreement, about being more efficient and the nosebleeds and the quality of the air and the precision tune-up or whatever, he said, my best guy goes to those jobs when he's slow on new sales appointments. And he sells over 70%. And my question for you is, how do you get the companies more involved in service agreements and how do you teach them on the importance of them? Getting a company involved in service agreements isn't hard. It's just a set of processes and procedures that technicians need

to perform every time. Most companies try this with a hit and miss pattern. They don't require all their technicians explain a service agreement to every customer. They don't require a technician to offer a service agreement to every customer. And the end result is the customer doesn't understand what a service agreement is or even know that you have one. So that's the first key, getting all of your technicians on every call they go on to offer one. The second is to include service agreements in all of your marketing. And the third one is to maximize your opportunities in those service agreements. A minute ago when we were talking about how do we get the inexperienced guys to enter this industry and do what's never been done before, part of the process is putting them on, they will send a technician out on the job, but on every job, he scores the equipment as far as age of the equipment, possible repairs, and past maintenance.

That information gets put into the equipment's life, I'm able to send the guy that's able to communicate better, like you just talked about, and get that 70% closing ratio. Because I'm sending the right guy to the right place, utilizing the information that I've previously been thrown away. What would you say, you know, a lot of people, they say, I don't want to train a guy because, you know, there's so much money. If I spend $5,000 on this person, when I look at my top guy, I got to tell you, you know, the guys in the garage industry out there, my top guy did $10,000 of door sales yesterday. I make the money back that it takes to train these guys. And the last five guys that I've trained have gone out and they literally have broken records in my markets because they got trained the right way. They didn't have any bad habits. And so many people say, I need to keep this guy. They need to hire somebody. So they get the first guy they get or the gal. And I see it with CSRs.

I see it with dispatchers and they hire the wrong people and they, they just live with them. And I see it with CSRs, I see it with dispatchers. And they hire the wrong people and they just live with them. And they say, this is the best I'm going to get. And I don't have the time and they work. This is a cliche, but they work in the business all the time. They're never working on it. How do you get people out of that pattern? Because a lot of the people that listen to this podcast are small business owners. There's about 10,000 a month that are listening. And what do we do to get them out of that day-to-day, the grind of business? Here's the thing about training and about your guys in the field. If you take heating, air conditioning, plumbing, electrical, whatever, and take the number of calls that the average guy today will. Now, you know, our guys run less calls per day

because we get more out of each call. But as I work with a lot of different companies, I find out contractors have technicians out there that are running five or six calls a day. But even if the guy only runs four calls a day and he takes two weeks off, he's going to run a thousand calls calls a day. But even if the guy only runs four calls a day, and he takes two weeks off, he's going to run 1000 calls in a year. So if you took that and broke it down to 1000 calls a year, and it costs $5,000 to train him, he only has to make you $5 more on every call

to pay for it. And a properly trained technician, after he comes back from training, whether it's technical or non-technical communication skills, he's going to increase his average ticket by 30%. You know, so if you take this technician who increases his average ticket by 30%, heck, just drop it to 20%, it's hard to say that he's not going to make $5 a call over a year. And he's paid for it. But just like you said, you sent your guys to training and they came back and they're selling $10,000 a day. Well, how long does it take you to get your training investment after that? And I know a lot of the smaller guys out there have invested in training for their technicians, but they often don't train the right way. What most contractors do is, and it's the biggest mistake they'll ever make, is they send their employees to training. But that's all they do, is they send them.

And they've never been through the training class themselves. And since they've never been to the training class themselves, they don't know what the technician was trained to do and even more important than that, they don't know how to manage the process after he gets back. So, the implementation never happens. So, what I advise every contractor to do if you're going to send somebody to be trained is if you can go yourself. When we do technician communication skills training, I don't do that anymore for distributors and manufacturers unless I do a management class with it. So the people that are sending me techs to be trained know what I'm training them to do and how to implement it. And those are the people that get

the biggest bang for the buck. They get their investment back hundreds of times over. But if you're a small contractor, I always recommend know what your guy's being trained to do. Then talk to the people that are training them and find out even more importantly, how to implement the process and make sure that it's being done so you can create that forward motion and keep it moving. I love it. I love this stuff. This stuff is like the reason I wake up in the morning. It's so much fun. I talked to a guy yesterday, actually my cousin in Colorado Springs, and he said, hey, he's got one of his technicians out of the job. And he said, my son, who's my cousin, Travis, went with him. And he said, you know, he walked out of the house.

It was an $800 ticket. But he didn't sell him a bottom rubber or an operator reinforcement bracket. So it could be a capacitor in the HVAC industry. It could be any part. But he said, you know what really pisses me off is when my son told me that he just stopped. He said, well, we already charged this much. And I said, that's unbelievable that you wouldn't have a checklist and to go through each and everything and give the customer the option and explain to them. You know what my four letter word is that I hate is recommendation. My recommendation. I've never said that. I've never told a customer, I tell them, this is what you need to do because this part has failed and

here's why. And have you ever bought anything when somebody recommends it? Because recommend just means it'll make it a couple more years. You know what I mean? Uh-huh. It puts it out into the future. It puts it out. One of the things that I love about it, I love the theory of get customers and keep customers. Because that means I'm earning customers' business

and I'm keeping them as my customer by selling a service agreement. But more importantly, I've got my internal customers. How much do you think it should be? I mean, I love the idea of internal recruitment, because it's not coming from LinkedIn or CareerBuilder or Monster or Indeed or Craigslist. It's actually coming from a recommendation and A players know other A players.

What do you think is a really good price to pay somebody to get somebody in that they know to become a recruiter for you? Well, we do several different things and it depends on whether it's installation, whether it's technician, whether it's salesperson. We have a recruitment program where we pay our technicians. I think it's, and I'm going to go by memory. I think they get a $500 sign-on bonus when their guy that they bring in hits his 30-day mark. And then we give them a percentage of the guy's earnings for, I believe it's three months at one level and up to six months at another level. So they've got not only a recruitment plan, they've got to keep this guy motivated and stay here plan. I like that. That's what I do with my field supervisors is they manage five technicians and they get a percentage on every single guy.

And the mistake I made. Well, let me just tell you, my compensation programs are great. And I figured, man, if they hit these numbers, I'm golden. Right. I did all the math. I worked out an Excel sheet, a pivot table. I did all the math, a graph. And then they hit the numbers within two months. They were maxed out and I go, holy shit. So now I'm working on a new program that lets them take a piece of everything over a line and it's gross less parts or sales less materials. And what I find is there's really no end to the success these guys are going to have when, but you know what, they hit their number. Then they said, Hey, we're good. And they just continue to hit that number each month. And I'm

doing great with it. But I'm like, man, if I continue to challenge them, coach them, show them how to sell all their parts, like garage door storage solutions and epoxy flooring. Like I said, I don't need to cheat customers to make a lot of money. And what I find is my best guys, I love it when they make 160,000 a year. That means I made a lot of money and that scares people. That scares a lot of business owners. They go, I never would pay that. They're making more money than me, but that's because they have the wrong compensation programs. They don't motivate the right stuff. And you're so right about the fact that they come up with a technician mentality. What do you think the biggest failure is? Is it the marketing in a

company? Is it the lack of technology or leadership? Where do most companies, when you see 90% of them, that they're missing it. Marketing and pricing. Most HVAC plumbing and electrical companies wait to look for leads until they need them. And that is a huge mistake because you have this big lag time. And I tell everybody all the time, waiting for leads till when you need them is like waiting to plant the garden until when you're hungry. You know, the plants have to grow. And the seasonality of our businesses, if we leave them to their own devices, will kill you because they go from real busy to nothing. It doesn't slow down gradually. So the marketing is a huge issue. And then pricing, because they don't believe in their product and services enough, that it's the best value in town, not just the average value in town,

but the best value in town, they don't have their self-priced right. And then they look at a guy that works for somebody else, and you tell them you paid this technician $150,000, $160,000, $200,000, whatever. They say they could never pay a guy like that. Well, the reason they could never pay a guy like that is because they've never set their business up in order to have a guy that could produce that. And they never priced their products and services properly to allow for compensation on the sales side. When they sell their self, they don't even figure a commission in.

And they think their business can operate that way forever. You know, and the guys that do that are the same guys that I know that are the same technicians. They blame it on the weather. Yeah, my market's not like your market. It's different here. It can never be done here. It's tax season. Well, Christmas is right around the corner. They all got the same excuses, the technicians. And then I see the business owners in the same boat. And they say,

I can never charge those prices. I can never pay more than $12 an hour for a gal answering the phones or a guy answering the phones. I don't even know how you sleep at night. And I go, you know what, what happens when you go out of town? If I was to tell you today, we're leaving to go to Hawaii. I'm taking your wife, your dog, your kids. I'm paying for the whole trip. I'm paying for the meals, the volcano tours, the swim with the dolphins. But you are not allowed except to log in and look at your day at the end of the night. That's it. What does your business look like in a month? It ceases to exist because you don't have a business. You have a job and you're a technician at heart. And you know,

I talked to, I was a pre-dental a long, long, long time ago. And I talked to a dentist and he goes, dude, before I go to dental school, I go to business school because you come out of dental school with $250,000 in debt and you work for somebody until you're 45. Then you get into more debt. And by the time you're 55, you've got a nice retirement. But he said, learn how to run a business first. And these people, you're absolutely 100% right. They're technicians. They start out as technicians and they go, I don't think it's fair that this company charges this when they only pay $10 for this and they charge $150. Well, the indirect costs are where the money lies. And people think, well, I don't need to pay my taxes. I don't need to have the insurance that they have. I don't want a nice truck. I don't want to use technology. Because most businesses fail within three years, I find, that go out of

technology. They're technicians. They don't know anything about business. You're right. It kills me. So when you go out, you said marketing is a big deal. Tell me a little bit about, you know, it's changed because it used to be the double truck and the yellow book. I believe more and more things have shifted to Google now than anything. But where do you find that the best bang for the buck is as far as marketing dollars? It depends on the growth of the business and the market that they're in. You know, I have an air conditioning company in Houston, so I purposely put it here. I live 180 miles from here, but I purposely put it here so I could

practice what I tell people to do. We have 3,500 licensed heating and air conditioning contractors here. So if I was a small contractor trying to grow here versus a small contractor trying to grow in a rural city in the middle part of the country, my internet tactics might be different. Now, the competition was so hard here when we started. About the first six months, if you Google our business name, you could not find us. So we had to begin with direct mail and telemarketing. And direct mail and telemarketing still work. And that piece of the equation works in every market in the United States. So it's an easy thing to do. It's sometimes a very foreign thing to do in the service business. Now, if I was a larger company, I would get with a reputable SEO pay-per-click company to build a high quality website. Now, that doesn't mean that as a newer guy,

I wouldn't want a high quality website because that's imperative today. But I would even put more emphasis on the SEO and the pay-per-click in a more mature and in a bigger market. You know, I see some guys that have a little bitty company in a small town and it's easy to get first page on Google and it's tough to do in some places. So there's a lot of marketing strategies, but the main thing you have to remember is never stop. Don't ever stop marketing. Every call is a marketing opportunity. If your technicians aren't marketing, if your technicians aren't offering service agreements, if your technicians aren't checking the complete system out so they

can look at everything that's wrong, whether it's plumbing, heating, or electrical, or HVAC, or whatever trade you're in. If they don't look at the whole thing, then you're going to have a hard time growing. And on the marketing side, what really kills contractors out there today are techs that run single task calls because they do no marketing. And single task calls cause low average ticket, high numbers of callbacks, and absolutely no lead generation whatsoever. So the marketing has to start with every call. The marketing has to start with direct mail and telemarketing. The marketing has to start as you grow with getting the right provider for your internet services, for your website, for everything that you do.

You know, I went out to my cousin's operation in Colorado Springs and I sat down with his guy. And one of the things I was surprised at is I'm pretty good at Google. I mean, I've been involved with search engine optimization, reputation management, and pay-per-click. I mean, the guy that works for me has almost spent $100 million just in the garage door industry. And he works for me. He doesn't, you know, he's not a guy that's available to hire. But long story short, I asked him a bunch of tough questions. What is he doing to raise the search engine optimization? What's he doing to

get found on the Google My Business page? How's he driving reviews? How much does he charge? And I fired him on the spot. It was so bad. And so what it caused me to do, and this is just, this is a month ago, it caused me to go out and I'm building a little thing for small businesses that is actually going to make them move up in the rankings. And this podcast is all about helping people out and not to be, you know, I'm not trying to sell anything, but it's so crazy how many people get taken advantage of when they have no clue how much business they could drive. Because people go to Google just like they used to go to the Yellow Pages when they need something. They might go to Facebook.

They might go to the Twitter possibly or some of these other places. But the fact is that, you know, when something breaks, they want it done now and they go to Google. And it's so easy to get to number one because nobody knows what they're doing. It's amazing how many guys are getting and gals that own companies are getting taken advantage of. And it just bothers me because they're paying 30% of their ad spend. So if I'm spending 10,000, I'm paying this guy three of it. That means I'm only spending 7,000. And they're only interested in spending your money because the more you spend, the more they make. It's a vicious cycle and it bothers me because I know what the capabilities are. As of last year, I was driving over 50% of my traffic, which we run 7,000 jobs a month.

I was driving over half from organic traffic. And now it's probably more. But it's a crazy thing to know that... And I do ValPak, Money Mailer, Sororo Gold. I dial for dollars. I mean, I do everything. Billboards, TV, radio, you name it. I'm still in a lot of yellow books. And believe it or not, over half of it came from organic traffic. But it's because I've done a good job branding and people recognize the name when they see it come up in the search engine too. I mean, branding is a tough thing for

people to understand. What is your take on that, by the way, Joe, as far as billboards, TV and radio? I think branding is an absolute essential part of your company. And here's the thing from a consumer's point of view. If you look like, act like, talk like, and walk like all of your competitors, and the only difference between you and them is you charge more. Why should I ever do business with you? You know, a business needs to be able to show the customer that they are different and show the customer that they are the company to be dealt with and show the customer that they're different and show the customer that they are the company to be dealt with and show the customer that they're the easy one to be found. When we take a look at

what branding has done for certain companies, there's things out there that you never, ever second think about. When you see a truck that looks a certain way, when you see a sign that looks a certain way, you know what business that is. When you see the golden arches, you know you're at McDonald's. Nobody else has got the golden arches. The brand did it for them years ago. And you might not be a big fan of McDonald's food, but the fact is it's one of the most valuable franchises in the world because it's easily recognizable and they have a system of processes and procedures that make it impossible to fail. And that brand has carried them forward. Now, as far as local brands go, and I take a look at the contractors that are doing it now and doing a great job, it's easier to do it today, but less emphasis is put on it by most contractors than there should be. With Facebook,

with YouTube, with all of these different things, the ability to separate yourself from everyone else is huge. And branding, making yourself easy to find, easily recognizable, is one of the simple, not so very expensive things that almost all the companies can do. Can you elaborate on that? Because the biggest mistake I find is people go, I ask them, what makes you different from Joe Schmo over there? And they go, we do drug tests and background checks. We're 24-7. I'm like, so does everybody else. And they say, well, we carry the highest site, best parts. So does everybody else. And a lot of people, they say, well, we show up within an hour. Okay. Well, I can work with that a little bit, but what else is better? Where do your technicians get trained? Tell me a little

bit more about why you're different. What can you give me some examples of how you differentiate yourself in a marketplace? Yeah. You know, a long time ago, I went through a sales and marketing program with Tom Hopkins and with Jay Abraham. And I've known Tom for a long time and I've known Jay for not that long. But one of the things that Jay talked about

was everybody should be able to tell whoever they're working with what unique benefit or advantage they get from doing business with you that your competitor can't easily say, me too. So what is that? Is it your 24-hour service? Is it that all of our techs are fully trained to work on all heating and cooling systems? Is it that we will come see you on Christmas if your air conditioning breaks down? are a customer, because you're a service agreement customer, you get this special list of benefits that the most important of to you should be priority service. So what is it you do? I want to be easily found and I want to be easily set apart. And the one thing we do at our air conditioning company in Houston is we do all the technical stuff, which everybody else does, but we absolutely assure the customer will be comfortable when we leave because we don't leave without doing temperature split and an airflow analysis on a house. You can go into a house and work on their

air conditioning equipment. Their air conditioning equipment can be absolutely perfect, but the comfort delivered by that system may not make the customer comfortable because the duct systems are bad. Where we live, almost all of the duct systems are bad. So our technicians are trained to show the customer about delivered comfort in the house. And because of that, we are different than everyone else. We charge more. When we replace systems, we often downsize them. And we give 100% guarantee that everything we do in the house will work or we'll come and take it out and give you your money back, which is a huge guarantee to most customers. We're visibly different than everybody. You know, our trucks are pink and white. We donate part of our profits to Susan G. Komen. Our technicians wear pink shirts. Since 80% of our customers are women, seeing one of our technicians in a pink shirt in the grocery store with the Susan G. Komen logo on there along with ours gets lots of

women to talk to our customers and creates more business as well for us to go in there and sell them our unique advantage, which is making them more comfortable than anybody else. I love that. You know, it's all about comfort advisors. And I work with a guy, I'm not sure if you're familiar with Al Levy. Is that what you call yes so one day al brought in these these different folders and he had this roofing folder and it's had step one step two step three and we've never made it easier to pick out a roof so i took that so there's a story about our company there's why we are who we are what are what we care about that we don't really go over. We tell the customer, you're more than willing to check this folder out. And then we go over our process. We give them every

option. We start with the best and then we go better than we go good. Most people go good, better, best. It's the best. It's the best way to do sales by far. And I find that the presentation that we deliver is 10 times better. The last guy was greasy. He gave them a paper invoice. He did it on the back of his truck and he's in and out. We sit down at their kitchen table. We take the time with them. We make sure the husband and wife are home, the decision makers.

And it's a completely different process. But I'll tell you this is Al had brought in the manuals and the org chart and the depth chart. And I think without these manuals of the 80% of your day for each CSR dispatcher and technician, it's hard to run a successful company. What is your take on manuals and actually living and breathing them every day? You know, we have a business operational manual that covers everything in the way our business runs. When we hire people, we give them a job description as to exactly what we expect. That's why we don't have as much turnover as everybody else. We hire a little more carefully

because we use the manuals and we use manuals from hiring to selling. People are visual learners for the biggest part. So our technicians come in, our entry-level techs, we show them what we expect, and the question is, can you do this, yes or no? And because they've read the manual and they know what's expected, if they can do it, then they can work for us. If they can't, it doesn't make them a bad person.

It just means they can't work for us. So we start out with a better person to start with. Then as we train them, we teach visually how to engage a customer using manuals, using presentation materials, and doing all these things. And just like you said, when Al brought you those manuals in there that you use on a sales call versus the technician that writes up the price on the back of his truck or roof, or the HVAC sales guy who just goes out and scratches off a few things, or even worse, writes a price and a brand on the back of his business card and says, when you make your decision, call me.

He makes no impression whatsoever on the customer because he hasn't told him anything about himself. I've sold thousands and thousands and thousands of roofs, and our presentation for roofs always started out by saying, the roof is the most important thing of your house. We got more for our roofs and happier customers than anybody else in this town? Well, I think that the first thing I say is this is the largest and most dangerous thing on your house. It's the way you get in and out, and it's 40% of your curb appeal.

And in the summer, you're going to keep that cool air in, and in the winter, you're going to keep the warm air in. And the bottom rubber on your garage door is the number one entryway of the bugs, those nasty critters that get in. In Arizona, we've got snakes, we've got scorpions, spiders. And when you can drive a motion and you can really tell a story is when you learn how to sell. But I tell my guys, don't be fake. But you're walking into their home. If you notice they have a Nest thermostat, they're probably interested in home automation. Talk to them about a new opener that they could

open and close from their phone. If you see they got a freezer or a refrigerator in the garage, you should probably talk to them about an insulated garage door. And I've got all these cues. And it's like, this stuff comes second nature to me, but these guys have never heard of it. They're like, well, I just feel like we're too salesy. And I'm like, do you really feel like you're not doing the customer a favor? The number one line I have to customers, if this was my mother's door, here's exactly what I would do. And you better believe that I'm going to fix this door. Amazing. I'm going to make sure they got the best parts on it. It's an insulated door. It'll never break on her. And that's what I tell customers because I don't like, I always go back to, you don't have to lie, cheat, or steal,

but they go, oh, well, you'll get by for a while on this. And exactly like you said, I had a guy in Milwaukee call me up and said, I want to be your new guy. I can run nine service calls in a day. I said, I'm not interested. It's just kind of funny. What is your take on home warranty calls? Do you think that that's a

good play or not? My take on home warranty calls is that if you don't manage the process, you will become to dislike them greatly. The key to home warranty calls or any of the insurance and a lot of the utility programs are to look at it as an opportunity for a new customer and train your technicians to look around and upsell. And most of the home warranty company calls that you're going on, the customer is under the belief that the homeowner warranty company will fix everything and anything, you know, just they call you and this magic is going to happen. And then if your technician isn't trained properly, he'll find five or six things that are wrong that should be addressed.

But because the customer doesn't understand what he's getting versus what he needs, if that presentation isn't made, you will become greatly disillusioned and so will the customer. So your technicians have to be properly trained on home warranty. And there's a couple of irritating things about it that you just have to get past. The wait time on the telephone. Well, if we're waiting a little bit longer for more profit, then I'm up for wait. It's just looking at it as what it is. You know, if I've got a lead generation cost of X percent, and I pick up a lead and get paid to do it, is that a good idea or not? So that's how I have to look at the home warranty business. Hey, I love home warranty calls. And you know, one of the things that I had a buddy come into

town a couple of weeks ago, and we rate our calls priority one through five, and we rate our technicians. And I match them up. So the lowest guy, the number one guy gets the number one priority job. And it's easy. It's so easy that anybody can do it. Yeah. One of the things I wanted to explain is home warranty calls can be very successful. You know, I stopped doing Home Depots because what I realized with Home Depots, Joe, is I've got Home Depot. I've got Clopay, who's the, it's kind of like the HVAC. It would be like the train or whatever. Right. And then I've got the customer. So there's three other people in the process.

And then I've got my company that gets blamed for everything. And, you know, I looked at my cousin and he's gotten a lot in a commercial. And I'm like, get the hell out of commercial. He goes, why? He goes, look at my tickets. I go, yeah, you charge $10,000, but you paid $9,200. So you literally made $800 if you don't have to run a warranty call. Same thing with these big builders.

You wait nine months to get paid. You got to carry extra insurance. They pay on their terms. And I'm like, you don't have the equipment. You don't have the skill level. You can't do flat rate on commercial for the most part. You know, they want it done and you got to fix it, but you're going out there all the time.

You're not set up for it. He went from making $300,000 to $120,000 because he started to get into commercial, but his revenue's up. But I'm like, it's so funny how when you don't have the data and you don't look at it and you don't have any key performance indicators, how you just, up getting taken advantage of other stuff you know that's exactly right tracking your numbers and knowing your numbers is super important there's a lot of great products out there that will help you do it you know service Titan and all the all those people out there the really smaller guys need to focus on driving revenue and working on putting enough money together to get into a program like that.

And it will greatly help them. Well, they all say it's too expensive, Joe. And that's what's so funny to me is they go, why would I spend $250 or $300 per technician when I could get this other program and pay that monthly for everything? And I'm like, so what's your average ticket? And they'll say, you know, $300 per technician when I could get this other program and pay that monthly for everything. And I'm like, so what's your average ticket? And they'll say, you know, $300. And I said, what's your margin on that? They'll say 20%. I said, what if I could get you double that to start out with? And what if I could tell you your best guys? But what if I could tell you on a moment's notice, I could log in and tell you, I get a text message every time my guy doesn't sell a ticket over $70. I get a text message every time we issue a refund. I also go into

there and I see every time we sell a worry-free special. And the fact is, I don't watch every single one of them, but they know I'm watching because I probably send out five text messages a day. I said, what happened on this one? Why didn't you call a manager? And it's crazy what it's done to my company. And they're just too short-sighted to realize. But a lot of them, I got to tell you, a lot of them are starting to take the plunge. And a lot of people have called me. I'm talking hundreds of people have called me and said, thank you so much. Because without listening to your podcast, I would have never done this. But what I love what you're doing is tell me, we'll get through this here. I just got a couple

more questions. Tell me a little bit about your training program. And if somebody wants to get involved in that, does it have to only, I'd imagine it's only HVAC, right? We're adding plumbing to it next month. We're finishing the building out on the plumbing school and it will be the same process. We take guys that don't know anything about our business, and we teach them the basics that it takes to be an HVAC maintenance tech.

On the plumbing side, we're going to take the basics that they need to be a maintenance, inspections, basic repair plumber in the nine to 10 day process. He'll understand how plumbing works. He'll understand how to use the basic tools. He'll understand how to change fixtures, change a water heater, and do the basic minor repairs of simple drain blockages, simple parts replacements, and fix common leaks and inspect the entire house while he's there. So that's how that program works. We made it as easy and as painless as we can for contractors. The way it works is we have contractors send technicians from all over the country. And I recommend that they do not get this person that they're sending a rent car. We have them fly in to Houston Intercontinental Airport, major hub, lots of cheap flights.

They Uber to the hotel. We put them in a residence type hotel. The hotel shuttle will bring them here in the morning. They give them breakfast. We give them lunch. The hotel shuttle will bring them here in the morning. They give them breakfast. We give them lunch. The hotel shuttle picks them up and takes them back to the hotel in the evening. They'll take them anywhere they want to go within about a four mile radius for dinner. So the meal costs are very low. We take them through our nine day class. Ninth day, they Uber back to the airport and they go back home ready to work. The only thing you have to do with the guys generally is to show them your paperwork, software, doing that kind of thing. So that's how this process

works. We've been super, super successful at doing it. And what really makes it work, Tommy, is it's 85% hands-on. I'm a firm believer in the guys that are going into the trades have to be able to physically perform their tasks so they're comfortable enough to not worry about that part and be able to talk to a customer. So they will have 40 to 45 minutes worth of class time, then they go and perform what they just talked about. Then they'll come back in, 45 minutes more class time, then they go perform what they just talked about. At the end of the day, every one of our technicians fill out what we call a learning assessment form. Here's what I learned that I think will help me most. Here's what I learned that will enhance the skills I already have. And here's what I went over

that I feel we need more review on. So every day my instructor gets that learning assessment form and he sees who isn't getting what topic. So the next day he can review that with that technician and make sure everybody moves forward at the same rate. We don't miss anybody. The costs for the classes are pretty reasonable. I mean, they're like $39.95. Most of the major manufacturers, if you have a co-op fund, will co-opt the training for you. So it's been a great, great boom to the industry. And I can only assume we'll be able to do the same thing on the plumbing side. And due to that cost and the ability to get it co-opted, and if you are a Service Nation service roundtable member, there's also a rebate on that cost. So it knocks the cost down substantially.

So a couple of quick questions on a follow-up about that. I know Jack Tester pretty well. I've talked to him a dozen times. I love Nexstar. I also love Sandler Training. I've done both to some capacity. I've got all the manuals of both. How does that differ from what you guys offer? Well, I know Jack too. I'm not sure exactly what they're doing and how they're doing it. You know, as far as the technical training program runs, you know, I was president of Future University. So I know how the couple of organizations that worked with them do their training for technicians. Our training, when you send a technician here, our fast track programs are nine days. Most of the other people, they'll either cut it back to five, which isn't long enough, or they'll give them two five-day classes, which is generally a disaster because you're sending somebody to me who's probably never been out of town unsupervised with a company credit card and then we give them the weekend off and I don't care how disciplined this guy is he generally finds a lot of places he shouldn't go

over the weekend so it takes me till Wednesday to getting back where we were on Friday. So that's why we do nine days. It cuts down the expenses and increases the learning potential. So that's the one big different thing that we do. And the amount of physical hands-on training with live equipment here. We have new equipment. We have older equipment. And because I have an air conditioning company, we have an endless supply of equipment on the HVAC side for the guys to work on, disassemble, put back together, make sure it runs, and see all the things that they're going to see in the field. So there's more reality on the technical side than anything else. Now, as far as the selling systems,

I know a little of Sandler system. I've never been through their entire training courses. I have been to a lot of training courses and I've taken the selling process, whether it's technicians or retail sales on the comfort advisor side, and broken it down to the simplest of all steps. And if you track my training from today back through what we produced with Future University back when I was working with Jim and John, my training and the way we teach it has created more million-dollar producers in the HVAC business than any single program out there, bar none. Now, there's a lot of people that say they've produced a lot of them, but when I ask them for the list of names and numbers, the list never

comes up. But I do know this, most of the training programs out there today all have elements of what I've created over the years. That's why I think ours is superior to the rest. And the biggest test is what are the results we're getting. So you teach these guys the technical skills to do tune-ups. I just got a question when it applies to everything else but HVAC. So I'll use Crossroads just because that's my industry. I've trained my guys to finish the service call and still offer a new door if it's fatigued. So I can put lipstick on a pig.

I can make this door work. Or I can apply what you paid today towards a new unit. And I can give you a really nice door, increase your curb appeal, and give you all the luxuries of the new technology, make it more efficient and save you air conditioning and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But what I found is in the HVAC industry, you landscaping, would it be best to train these technicians how to sell the big thing or would it be best to just have them say you fix it and then schedule another guy? But the problem I have is now you got to set another appointment and people are busy. They care about their time these days. I don't know if I'm better to take it through the

whole process and teach them everything A to Z or do what they do in the HVAC industry and schedule out a comfort advisor? Or in my case, it would be, I don't know, I don't have any special name for it, but what is your thought on that? Okay. What we teach technicians to do, and we have one day of customer communication skills training in the nine days, but what we train a technician to do, and we can do it because it's in our system that we use with our techs, is they score the equipment. There are so many points for how old the system is, so many points for probable repairs while I'm here, because he's already done his checklist, and has this system had any maintenance? Well,

each one of those sectors has a certain score. At the bottom, there is a legend down there that says, this many points, repair it. This many points, suggest replacement. This many points, time to repair it now. So my technicians are all on the same page as to what should be done. Now, as you train technicians, as you know, it doesn't matter what industry, and there are some with more proclivity to make sales than others. So the guys that really like sales and want to learn sales, that is a separate training process. But for the guys,

the entry-level ones, the process is they get to this certain point. We're presenting to the customer what's wrong with the system. And the technician just tells them, you know, the investment to get all of this done is this much money. According to my score sheet, it says you should replace it. But before I ask you to invest that much money in your old system, would you mind if I get you a second opinion from a senior service advisor? Well, almost nobody says no. And we almost always have one of those guys that can go right now. So there is no second appointment. There is no waiting. He's going.

I freaking love it, Joe. That's's genius anybody that's listening right now should be taking notes because these guys are showing up with a full truck with examples they're sitting out at the kitchen table and they're closers and i love that you call him you're calling the the marines on this and i love it you know it's like getting a second opinion from the heart doctor and the guy you know it takes the customer that says i want to getting a second opinion from the heart doctor and the guy, you know, it takes the customer that says, I want to get a second opinion. He's getting it. He's just getting both of them from you. I just, I got to tell you, Joe,

I've got a full two pages of notes here and I love guys like you who've been doing this so long. I love how you've sold more than just HVAC. You started out as a general contractor. And I got to tell you, I apologize for the noises in the background. I always do this for my PC, but since we moved in this building, it's not set up yet. And I really do apologize for the interruptions. But if somebody wants to get more of you, Joe, what's the best way to get a hold of you and find out more about your program or just touch base with you? You know, the very easiest way is to email me, text me, or call me on my cell phone, and I'll give you all of that information. Okay. To email me, my email address is Joe, at verizon, V-E-R-I-Z-O-N

dot net. Or you can reach me on my cell phone by just calling or texting me at 318-286-7742. I love it. And I always do this with every podcast guest. I got two last questions.

I've got a lot of books that have changed my life. It started out back in the day, I think in 2006 with the E-Myth. And since then, I've just gone crazy. I've got 750 something audibles. I've got books on every shelf in my office. I just love reading. If you could tell me three influential books,

it doesn't necessarily need to be about home service. It could be fiction for all I care or just something about self-determination. But do you have three? I was looking at the three kind of in order from three back to one. Okay, perfect. How to Influence and Influence People, that helped me a lot because it made me think the e-myth made me think more about business and how I needed to structure

my businesses so I did not have to become as involved as I was and since I did not start out in sales and kind of got into sales by accident I was not the greatest communicator.

I was just a princess kid. And the book that changed my career and my life more than anything else was How to Master the Art of Selling by Tom Hopkins. By who? Tom Hopkins. Oh, yeah. I love Tom Hopkins lives in Scottsdale actually yeah he does Tommy has become a personal friend of mine from long long ago and you know he is just

a super super guy but the book a lot of people think it's about Stella the book is how on how you talk to people and how you see people And I found it by accident in a bookstore. It was in paperback. And I read it until it just fell apart. I read it so many times. And now I've probably got half a dozen copies. And they're all over the place. But I still refer to it.

And there's no training programs that I do that I don't recommend to everybody in there that they get that book. Because if you can master those techniques of communication, it's going to help you do all the rest of the things in your business so much better. Because unless I can convince somebody that I've got the best product and service, and unless I can convince somebody that I've got the best product and service. And unless I can convince somebody that I've got the best business in town to work for, and unless I can convince somebody to stop what they're doing and get into our industry, none of the rest of these things are going to happen. So the communication skills that you need to learn are in there and it just will make a bigger difference than anything else you read in my estimation. I've read that book twice. And I got to tell you, the things I love is he's a real

estate expert, but he's a sales expert. He teaches you how to ask yes questions and say things with confidence. And he says, the number one thing I love is don't make it your own. Say exactly what I say and become an Say exactly what I say and become an expert at what I say and how I say it. Because everybody says, you know, hey, learn this and make it your own. But he just delivers this message

that's so spot on. It says, all you need to do is look in the mirror and repeat after me. And when you get good at it and you say it like I do, more sales will come. And that's right. It's a beautiful thing.

So Joe, the last thing is, you know, we've talked about a lot of things and I love to get the last bit, you know, maybe there's something we didn't touch upon. Maybe there's something you wanted to leave the audience with, or just anything you want to discuss here, I'll give you the floor and take it away. Well, you know, and I'm not sure 100% of the audience that listens to your podcast now and where they are in their level of business expertise, although I see a lot of people that do. So I see everything from a small business to a big business. My advice is this. Number one, systemize your business so you don't have to be there with your fingers on every single thing every single day. Because as you grow, it becomes physically

impossible to do it. The part of the system that you have to do as well is don't make your system complicated. Make your system easy. Most of us aren't building rocket ships and we're not performing brain surgery. We're running home service companies. So the processes and procedures aren't that hard and your systems don't have to be that hard either. So put systems in place, put systems in that everyone can understand, get your pricing where it needs to be, make every call include marketing for another call in the future, and hire the right people. People that want to grow in their career and grow in their life and be part of the machine that you're building. Joe, I got to tell you, it's been a pleasure. And I think the fact is that you have more wealth of knowledge.

You're right there with just so long that you've been doing this. You've seen it all. You consult people. You've got your own training program. I just, I'm fortunate to have you on here and we got to do it again soon. Well, thanks for inviting me. And a big thanks to my friend, Alan Ferguson in thanks for inviting me. And a big thanks to my friend Alan Ferguson in Australia for recommending me. I look forward to having a vacation with him and his beautiful wife this

summer. He's a blast, man. And I can't get through a podcast with him without 10 F-words, but I don't mind it. That's just him. He's so passionate about whatever he does. He says, uh, you know, people have told me just don't say that word, but I just get so fucking passionate. I can't. I don't even mind it. It's funny. And you got Al Levy. Who's like, he just tells me if I'm on a, if I'm on a roll, be like, stop. And I'm like, okay. Cause he's so reserved. It's just funny with all these different people. But it's nice to be able to take what you guys have figured out in

the HVAC plumbing and electrical, the Jim Abrams and the Ross Smiths and the Joe Cunninghams, and be able to apply this to any industry, because we deserve it. We deserve to make 20% or more. You know, we work weekends. And to say that we don't deserve this is just a fallacy. And we got a little John Wayne or Clint Eastwood going on over there. Well, Joe, I'm looking forward to you coming to Phoenix here. I'll let you go, but we'll get you on again soon. Okay. Thanks, Tommy. Thanks. Hey, guys, I really appreciate you tuning into the podcast. I wanted to let you know that my

book is available right now on Amazon. It's called The Home Service Millionaire. That's homeservicemillionaire.com. Just go to the website. It'll show you exactly where and how to buy the book. I poured two years of knowledge into this book and I had 12 contributors. Everybody from the COO at HomeAdvisor to the CEO of Valpak and of course, Ara the CEO of Service Titan. It tells you how to have the right mindset and become a millionaire and think like a millionaire. It goes into exactly how to turn on lead generation. Have those phones ringing off the hook for the customers that you want to be calling where you can make money and get great reviews. It also goes into simple things like how to attract A players. Listen, if you want a

great apple pie you need to buy good apples and you need to know where to buy those apples and it also talks about simple things like knowing how to keep the score. You should have your financial check every week. You should know exactly what's coming in and out of your account. You should know when to cut advertising that's not working. And more than anything, you should know how to cut employees that aren't making it for you. Listen, you might have a big heart, but this book is going to show you how to make decisions

built on numbers. I hope you pick up the book and I really appreciate everything. I hope you're having a great day. Tune in next week. Thank you.